Baja California: Scratches on the Cave Wall.
We arrive at the hotel and check in; the small swimming pool surrounded by grass and tropical plants, a few plastic chairs, nice and quiet. And its cheap. Across the highway is the Pacific ocean and a green lagoon fluttering with wildlife. Our room has no air conditioning but a ceiling fan and the windows are shutters and invite the sea breeze. That noise you hear are the birds nesting and the frogs around the lagoon and night is falling. There are many grander hotels lining the ocean shore and you can see the lights now but the Yuca Inn is old school and authentic even though the hum of traffic on the highway outside never stops.
We cross that highway and walk a mile on the clean white sand. The beach is wide and waves crump along the shore line and we sit on some large rocks that protect the harbor entrance and watch the night and the stars.
“When we get to Bio Sana we’ll hike up to the sacred caves and the hot springs in the Sierra de la Laguna,” AJ says.
AJ and I met in Brooklyn on Vanderbilt Avenue. It was in my Stone and Garden store-front with potted plants and gayly painted planters in the window and AJ walked in one day to explore for he was an explorer and had worked as a permaculture consultant internationally. And as we talked and compared notes, both Australian expatriates cutting our paths through the world, we became friends; we became good mates. And it was not long before he encouraged me to travel to New Orleans where he was teaching a permaculture course. Permaculture was to become an important milestone for me on my journey.
Years before I’d heard of Bill Mollison. In fact I think it was his first trip to New York in the early eighties. An earnest and righteous photographer brought me a two-hour VCR tape videoed in Manhattan’s Central Park. Mollison was sitting on a granite rock drinking a bottle of vodka. He was selling his ideas like a medicine man but it was good medicine and by the time the bottle was empty I was intrigued and started a permaculture file.
In the sixties, as the Vietnam war worsened and Australians were dying in the jungle, Mollison turned his back on conventional protest and shouting in the streets and went deep into the temperate rain forest of Tasmania and watched and listened and started writing and over two years a book unfurled and he became a living legend.
The forest was an education, a self-sustaining system. A forest grew on a forest. Everything was useful and there was no waste. Mollison watched, listened, studied Aboriginal knowledge and the Dreamtime and conjured the concept of permanency in culture; self-sustaining, resilient systems applicable to human habitation.
And so I signed up for the course and flew to New Orleans and spent two weeks with a dozen other acolytes immersed in permaculture and it was a marvel to me. I remember it was hot as hell and we gathered in a large room on the outskirts of Westwego.
AJ was one of the teachers but the main man was Geoff Lawton, an Englishman immigrated to Australia who talked about greening the desert and how nature and gardens tell stories, who’d taught in dozens of countries and was Mollison’s heir apparent. He brought me to tears and as the week ended I was beginning to understand and as if through a prism I saw a different light. But there were reports of a hurricane building heading towards the Gulf and the course had to be postponed.
I wrote in my diary:
“Hurricane Ivan has killed nearly seventy people so far as it barreled through the Caribbean and now it’s headed to New Orleans. The mayor calls a state of emergency. We are packed and ready to move. It's a category five with winds in excess of one-hundred and fifty-six miles per hour now approaching.
“New Orleans is a city built below sea level protected by levees. I am staying in one of those shiny aluminum art-deco Airstream caravans with Will, the guy hosting the course. He runs Swamp Tours. If the storm maintains its current path there will be substantial flooding, perhaps up to twenty feet deep. I look up at the levee behind the Airstream where I sleep and I guess it’s about ten feet tall so I’ll be underwater.”
Next morning we await the update from weather authorities. The storm seems to be veering east and weakening, winds now seventy-five to eighty, insufficient to destroy structures but nothing is certain and the New Orleans mayor is calling for mandatory evacuation.
“But what about the infirm and the poor”, I wrote, “ the homeless and prison population? There seems to be no plan and I heard Homeland Security shipped in two-hundred-thousand body bags before the airport closed. Police began taking names of people who refused to leave and registered body markings like tattoos, for identification purposes.”
We finally decided to leave. Lawton had been hesitating because he wanted to experience the eye of the storm but we headed north to Baton Rouge and higher ground on the Louisiana-Mississippi border. One of the students and her grandmother invited us to stay on their plantation.
That night we clambered on the Swamp Tour school bus with the silver Airstream behind us and we left. The freeway is a parking lot but clears the further north we go and we take some backroads and arrive at two am in the morning.
The plantation house is set amid moss draped live oak trees and shady verandahs all around and inside dim and cool, hand-hewn, with broad floor boards and high ceilings and wide passage ways and the scent of the past in the curtains. It belonged to an uncle who, after his return from World War Two, was a recluse and sat alone dressed in his military uniform shooting spit balls across the room.
That evening, after cocktails in the drawing room, eighteen of us sat around the formal dining table with the family for spectacular gumbo. By now Ivan had moved on and New Orleans missed the worst of it. But the following year in 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the area, the levees broke and killed nearly fourteen hundred people.
That first night in Baja, AJ and I meet a long timer. I remember it was dusk and the street lights were hazy in the humidity when we found the restaurant on the other side of town. The masonry was old and faded and the wooden door creaked when it opened and it was cool inside.
The guy was already at a small table against the wall and he waved us over. He was an American expat and imported organic fertilizer, that’s what he said and he told us he’d driven the drug infested Highway-One, fifty times.
“Fifteen hundred miles, twenty five hours if you’re lucky, from Tijuana on the US side to Carbo San Lucas on the Sea of Cortez”.
And then I saw he was sitting in a wheel chair.
“Had a bad one on the highway about twelve years ago”, he said and sipped his tequila.
I wondered about wheel chairs in Mexico, the steep curbs and cobblestones and the deep gutters that carry the downpours, the broken concrete and broken streets and broken hearts of Mexico.
AJ has always been a bit of a wanderer searching for his Philosopher's Stone. He was a tall honey-skinned man, thin as a rail and as strong, part native New Zealander, part Maori and true blue Australian. He was a man who never rushed in where angels feared to tread and that put him on the side of the angels.
“Baja Bio Sana is my soft place to land,” AJ said as we walked along the path towards the outdoor kitchen, “You told me that Andrew”, and it was true.
Will and AJ formed a bond at the permaculture course in New Orleans and talked about creating an intentional community. It was Will who suggested Baja in Mexico. He rode the length of the Peninsula in 1973 with his girlfriend on his motor cycle when Highway One first opened. He loved the wild, lonely desert.
So AJ and Will visited Baja together and heard about this abandoned mango orchard out near the base of the Sierra de La Laguna mountains near Cholo and Miraflora; the Sierra de Laguna Mountains, a lush range of lagoons, hot springs ancient cave art and cool Pinyon pines and evergreen black oaks, a UNESCO protected biosphere overlooking the mango orchard. They called the project Baja Bio Sana, “Healthy Life”.
AJ engaged Mexican lawyers and set up a Mexican non-profit. Five founders bought into Bio Sana at ten-thousand dollars a share. That gave them enough money and land to build a community. No permits required but approved by the partners. By this time AJ was married to an exotic, shamanic woman with a pedigree like the United Nations. Her name was Shenaqua. The locals said there was a grandmother spirit in the gardens at Bio Sana and Shenaqua agreed for she was a gifted empath.
AJ and Shen rented a masonry house in La Paz, on the way to Bio Sana, with cool tiled floors and crimson bougainvillea creeping over the whitewash and that’s where we stayed a couple of days before driving further south and inland.
La Paz is capital of Baja, the youngest Mexican state. It embraces the Sea of Cortez and over the horizon is the Mexican mainland and Sonora. Before the United States Civil War, an American mercenary, William Walker captured La Paz with forty-five men. He wanted to create a slave colony, including Sonora, declaring it the Republic of Lower California but soon Walker was driven out by Mexican forces. He was ultimately arrested by the British Navy and handed over to Honduran authorities and shot. The landscape has a tragic quality infused with the clatter of Spanish armor, wild dogs, gunfire and blood.
I walked the malacon, the seawall looking out at the cruising yachts, fishing smacks and pangas and the clear green water of the Sea of Cortez. There are few tourists and it’s quiet. There are vendors selling fresh orange juice, tropical fruit salad breakfast and strong coffee. There’s a bronze statue of Jaques Cousteau looking out to sea. He explored the extraordinary biodiversity and loved La Paz. I imagine living here to finish my book. Three months is what I need to heal and write.
The road into Baja Bio Sana is bone rattling; crossing arroyos that carve through the hard desert. The Sierra de la Laguna mountains in the distance growing larger and the cactus grow taller and the sun flares on the dusty windscreen and skeletal branches scrape the sides as the dirt road narrows and we approach a painted sign on a post: “Baja Bio Sana”.
I get out of the truck and pull back the barbed wire gate wound around a tree branch frame and AJ drives through and I drag the gate shut to keep the wandering cattle out. We pulled up in a cloud of dust that swirled in the sunlight which was now turning from silver to gold and we walked towards the entrance with our bags.
A one-man tent was set aside in an open patch of grass and I threw my gear inside as twilight fell and carefully zipped the tent closed for I’d been warned about scorpions and snakes.
“Make sure you give a knock-knock on the toilet seat before you sit, roaches, spiders, centipedes and scorpions like it under the toilet seat.”
“Knock knock, who’s there”, I thought, there’s a red back under the toilet seat.
“Be careful not to crush them”, Shenaqua said, “the long centipedes are bad and it crawled up my leg once,” and she cried out and whisked the blanket back and it was there on her leg and AJ sprang into action and scooped and flipped it off, “the same way with scorpions”, he said.
The slender, sun tanned, young man had eyes that seemed iridescent they were so bright and they were disconcerting. He told me he was from the suburbs in New Jersey and grew up on Ritalin, a central nervous system stimulant prescribed for ADHD and narcolepsy. The other common drug is Adderall, an amphetamine which hits harder. That’s the one the President of the United States of America, Donald Trump prefers. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
So the blazing-eyed young man from New Jersey with hair turning to dreadlocks, a sarong around his hips and bare feet had recently completed a nine day dark retreat in the Dragon Temple, an earth bag and adobe structure with a dragon’s tail. He sat in complete darkness for nine days and only the dove’s chortling at dawn and dusk told him when night became day and day became night in the dark.
“I felt a merging with no boundaries, inhabiting the whole vibrational space in the dark”, he said. "But it was stuffy and not properly ventilated and the toilet bucket smelt bad and black mould started growing on the ceiling".
One afternoon when the sun was hottest I saw a woman sitting alone in the shade at the outdoor kitchen table. I approached and sat opposite and noted her proud and imposing disposition. She was visiting Bio Sana for a Breath Workshop with one of the partners. He was well known for these workshops and had constructed a large, circular adobe temple-like structure with Persian rugs on the mud floor. She was a student and teacher in Lithuania where she did breath counseling for corporate executives. She had two grown sons and her earthen brown eyes exuded calm and she stood and embraced me.
“Now, come with me”, she said and I fell under her soft spell for over an hour laying on my back on the Persian rugs breathing as she breathed, in the adobe temple, long, deep breaths that poured through me like a river and the pulses of the tides. When I opened my eyes I saw her watching over me like the Black Madonna.
I gathered wood and helped prepare the fire for the Spring Equinox celebration.
I remembered how, in Brooklyn on Underhill Ave, before the turn of the millennium, we celebrated the Pagan calendar in the snow in brownstone backyards. We craved ritual and ceremony connecting us to Earth and nature and a higher vibration of life.
Back in Baja Wally’s sitting with a cute green eyed girl, her hair bleached by the searing Baja sun. She’s brown and smooth and five years old and smiling like a berry. Wally’s third-generation Chinese and he’s one of those guys you met down here; laconic, experienced, tough, primal people drawn to anonymity, cactus, desert nights and the blue moon mountains, peaks and pools and valleys, canyons and cave paintings on the walls and the waterfalls and the black birds flying in the blue Baja sky.
“I’m seventy-five. Cut down big trees and run a lumber yard and sailed boats, delivered them from Alaska to La Paz. I seen the ocean full of dolphins skipping on their tails so far as the eye could see; the sea was full of dolphins that day.”
And he smiles and then we talked about the Bermuda Triangle and UFO’s as we sit around the fire. And the little girl was sitting on her mother’s knees now and an old burro started braying in the distance and then there was a clinking, clanging cowbell out there somewhere and now the yelping, yipping sweet sound of coyote pups and the howl of their mother in the Sierra de La Laguna foothills.
Jeanette, a French-Canadian settler was singing one of her compositions with a rich, loud voice, reading the words with eye glasses balanced on her nose and a headband flashlight around her forehead.
She came to live in the small village of Cholo close by Boi Sana where there is one small cantina, a bodega and el carnicero up the road, he’s the butcher and he hangs carcasses from a tree outside his house beside the dirt road. This is deep in rural Baja California Sur on the road to Bio Sana. She teaches the kids. She was a teacher back in Canada and now she teaches in the desert.
She taught computers and tried to steer them away from pornography she said and she taught music on a baritone uke with guitar tuning and they learned songs together. And now she was drumming a sensuous rhythm, soft and caressing, bringing down the moonlight and brightening the stars as we watched the flames.
There was a tall, lank man with etched bronze skin and his straw blond hair framing his face that looked like the Sierra de Las Lagunas. He hiked up there and climbed searching for hieroglyphs, writing on the wall and petroglyphs, scratched pictures from the past. He looked deeply into the fire, his hooded brown eyes reflecting the dancing flames, sitting holding his long legs close to his chest, the sinews in his brown arms flexing when he adjusted his body.
He was a Frenchman who’d lived out there somewhere for years with his French-Canadian wife and they hiked together deep into the Sierra de La Laguna; the hidden caves and crevices, clinging to life.
“Right here”, he said and the Frenchman pointed to his calf above his ankle,
“I heard it first and felt the rattle right there and the next thing I was over there, I just jumped so quick I didn’t know what happened.”
The air was cooler now. This is the Tropic of Cancer, the northern edge of the Tropics, a dry desert with nearly a foot of rain a year all at once and it scars the landscape; sculptured arroyos roar with rolling rocks and logs and push mountains of silt towards the sea.
AJ hands me a package of dried fruit and nuts and I fill two water canisters.
We drive out to the base of the mountains and park under a tree as the sun rises. It was still cool and dew glistened on the rocks. The Sierra de la Laguna are the highest in Baja and from the summit is a three-sixty view, the blue Pacific on one side and the green Sea of Cortez on the other.
We clambered up rocky, uneven paths, through narrow gorges surrounded by limestone cliffs and gray boulders, cactus, scrawny oaks and pinion pines and suddenly I felt a presence and it reminded me of Peter Weir’s filmic masterpiece “Picnic at Hanging Rock”; a group of Victorian school girls in flowing white dresses, bonnets and white gloves, disappear in the mountains in Australia, a place like this and AJ pointed to a shadow in the cliff face and it was the entrance to the sacred caves and I hear pan pipes and a faint melody. In the dim light were scratches on the cave wall, paintings twice as tall as a man, animal silhouettes from forty-thousand years ago.
And later, we sat silent in the hot springs, the water steaming and slightly sulphureous, it was dark and soon the heavens were ablaze and we lay back and watched the stars slowly moving across the sky.
“Scratches on the cave wall. That’s all. That’s all they’ll find”, AJ said.
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